Girls are better than boys

In 1911, HG Wells complained that he couldn't go for a stroll on Hampstead Heath "without hearing some devoted woman doing her best to persuade a group of ribald hearers that women are entirely different from men and should therefore be given the vote upon identical terms".

The contradiction Wells was pointing out lay at the very heart of the suffrage movement, and it is the one that Melanie Phillips picks apart in her new book. This double standard - "the simultaneous argument that women are the equals of men and that women are men's moral superiors" - persists to this day. However, if you want to know what she makes of contemporary feminism you will be disappointed, for this is a book that does exactly what it says on the cover. It is a history that lets the ideas speak for themselves.

For her fans and critics alike this will be something of a surprise. The terrifyingly strict Melanie Phillips of columnar fame, who sits in moral judgment, surveying the mess of broken families, forgotten promises and weak politicians, is not much in evidence here.

Far from being a polemic, this is a calm, dare I say gentle book that is shot through with Phillips's customary clarity. The history of women getting the vote is, of course, about so much more than just that. Indeed, the vote itself was never the fundamental issue for many suffragettes. It was simply a means to an end, the end being the revolutionising of society by getting it to adopt the moral values of women. It is precisely this revolutionary, indeed spiritual-side that often gets lost in the traditional telling of the suffrage story.

We know enough about the psychodrama of the Pankhurst family, the hunger strikes, the force-feeding and the civil disobedience that lead slowly but inevitably to the extension of the franchise to women.

Yet underpinning this constitutional struggle were many ideas that had come to the fore a century earlier and that continued to animate debate.

The 19th century was a time of pathological insecurity about social breakdown. Female intellectualism was suspect. Women, whose nervous systems were thought to be different to men, were assigned entirely to the domestic sphere - unless they were working-class and therefore already depraved.

For the Victorians, it was clearly the middle-class who could reform society, and for middle-class women the language and apparatus of evangelicalism gave them a way to do so. They would revolutionise the public sphere by bringing to it the moral superiority, virtues and sensibilities that had been ascribed to the domestic sphere.

The great evil they attacked was male sexuality. Disturbed by the Darwinian theory that there was not much to separate man from animal and Malthusian cant about the birth-rate, they focused on sexual habits of the poor and were confronted with the shocking reality of prostitution. The bodies of prostitutes were literally fought over. Prostitutes were accused of corrupting the nation's morals, yet sexual injustice for women was presided over by a political system that excluded them.

The Social Purity Alliance saw that men were responsible for the degradation of women and girls and that it was men who spread moral as well as venereal contagion. The laws protecting women, their children and their property had to change, but they would not change as long as only men made them. Therefore, in some very real way, as Phillips writes: "Sexual continence by men could only be delivered by votes for women."

On this issue, as with so many others, there was a huge range of opinion among the suffragettes. The movement could not agree over tactics any more than it could agree over marriage. Some women were fighting a sex war against men, others worked happily alongside them, others wanted to be free of these "waste products" and live in a chaste and mystical world.

Phillips shows beautifully that the vote was really symbolic of a far wider range of issues on which women were struggling to find a public voice.

There is not a page of this book that does not reverberate in the present, though Phillips allows herself only a brief epilogue to suggest how. I wanted more of her, if only to argue with. Instead, this fine book simply reminds us that, in many ways, we keep having the same old arguments. Rachel Cusk's new novel, The Lucky Ones, is published on 7 April by 4th Estate.